I read this article on ExtremeTech today and it moved me. The author makes so many great points, especially:
Maybe you’ll enjoy it too.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2286801,00.asp
We do like to grill… nevermind that it’s 10:50 PM and around 40 degrees (Fahrenheit).
It is Monday again, wonderful Monday. I am at school waiting in between classes. Math went as usual, however a math class goes that is. Programming went as usual, nothing out of the ordinary. A small portion of code written in class, and as usual for Monday, an open lab with no actual assignment. So I attended the lecture, showed up to lab for my homework, and then was allowed to leave. I had a pretty tasty sub and some meatloaf for lunch. After lunch I headed back here to school and went to my rhetoric class. We reviewed papers and how the instructor grades them. I got my paper back, 9 out of 10, which is plenty good for me since I get to revise it for another grade a week from now. We had a post due on our class blog about the research topic our groups chose, so I finished that before class, just a quick 1 paragraph summary and 1 paragraph response. Now I am sitting in Purvine waiting for my CST 130 class. It does not appear to be canceled as it was on Friday. Friday I sat here for an hour waiting only to find class was canceled, and it was such a beautiful day outside. Very disappointing! I was going to go on a bike ride after I get home from class, but it appears that it is going to snow on us. I woke up at 5:30am this morning to go for a bike ride, but again the weather was less than decent. It should warm up again tomorrow. This weekend was in the 70’s and felt great! Hope this cold front passes quickly. The snow is supposed to stick tonight, but I doubt it will last long tomorrow during the day.
Time to finish a little bit of homework so I don’t have to do it later when I get home, even though I doubt I will be able to go outside. Just in case!
Last night was pretty sweet. Came home from school, relaxed for a little bit and then Drew came over. Aaron, Drew, and I walked up the hillside for a hour or two or so. I need to get out and walk more, it felt good to be outside. Then we all went to the store and got some chicken, beer, and other various supplies we would need to have a BBQ. We came home and then all helped cook, it turned out awesome. The chicken was excellent, Honey Dijon mustard, Mayo, seasonings. Mmm. We also made garlic bread and rice. While we ate we watched hitman, and then Drew had to go. Aaron and I played guitar hero 3 for a while after that, and tried to watch the movie “Sexy Beast.” But….it was….different. We eventually called it a night. Now I am out on the deck again enjoying the nice day and relaxing as I make this post.
My alarm went off at about 7 am, shortly thereafter I vanquished it. That is when this very lazy day began. I ended up getting up at about 8:50 am, and going to Home Depot, and Fred Meyers. Just walked around for no apparent reason. This is what happens when you are bored and lazy, yet feel like you must do something. Eventually at 1:30 pm I made it back home so I could install Visual Studio on my computer for class wednesday. Breck said I could use XCode, so I will likely end up using that for the most part. I will become familiar with Visual Studio, just in case I must use it in the future.
Even though this is laaazy Tuesday, I think I will do my research paper for CST 116 that is due Friday. Probably at least start my program to convert inches to centimeters, if I dont get it finished and working. But that isn’t due until next Wednesday. Ah look, already the excuses for procrastination have begun!
I am posting this blog, and Aaron is updating WordPress, which we both have decided these things are much more important than cleaning up the defeated tacos that have taken up residence in our kitchen.
Gah my original post was destroyed….The tacos have retaliated!!
Alright kids, let this be a lesson to you: Always securely close your leftover containers!
Woke up at about 6:00am today and lay in bed reading the next two articles in my Humanities. Finally convinced myself to wake up at about 8:03am. Got dressed and ready and had a bagel and some butterfinger hot chocolate, and then left for school at 8:36am. Oh, and Coke is my pepsi! Fire is my ice! Water is my dirt! Pain is my vicodin! Oxygen is my carbon dioxide! Sugar is my salt! Heaters air my air conditioners! So now it is lunch time and I have until 12:30pm before I have to leave for class. I ate some roast beef and gravy stuff, and then I will play some Gears of War with aaron. Then when I am out at 3pm I will head home and grab a snack and play some Day of Defeat and DAoC.
Because I have daily need for both Linux and Windows XP, I set out to get these operating systems running on my MacBook Pro in addition to OS X 10.5 Leopard. I attempted this feat previously with 10.4 Tiger and had more trouble than I decided the project was worth.
Fortunately the process seems to have been simplified greatly by Apple with Leopard. This post on the Ubuntu Forums by violajack covers the method I’m currently attempting:
Easiest triple boot ever. Leopard, Gutsy, Vista
I just spent the day trying to set up a triple boot via various guides out there and found that there is an easier way, especially for those who don’t want to partition from the command line.This is on a C2D Macbook.
I started from a clean install of Leopard on the whole disk. Then I installed rEFIt, since I wanted to make sure that would work. It didn’t work from the installer, and I did have to venture into the terminal to fix it with the manual install commands:
cd /efi/refit
./enable.shThen I used Bootcamp Assistant to set up a 30G partition for Vista. This is the one step that most guides tell you not to do, they all say you have to partition from the terminal using diskutil resizeVolume. I just kept toasting my partition maps with that thing, and when I did get it right, the windows installer would complain and refuse to proceed. Going straight from bootcamp was the only way I could get the windows install to cooperate.
I completely installed Vista leaving me with OSX and Vista via plain old normal bootcamp. Bootcamp changes your startup volume, so I had to hold Alt to get the option to boot into OSX again. I reran the rEFIt enable.sh, but I’m not sure if that was really necessary. I had to then change the startup volume back to the mac partition, which allowed it to boot into rEFIt again.
From OSX, I used the GUI Disk Utility from the Utilities folder. If you click on the main disk (not on of the two partitions) you will have a tab option for Partition. From the graphic of the two partitions, click the main OSX partition, then click the little plus sign and it will split the OSX partition into two. You can then drag the space between to set the size of the new partition and name it whatever you want. Disk Utility will only format it as HFS+, but the Ubuntu live CD will gladly reformat it to ext3 for you. The partitions did not stay proportional size-wise in the GUI, but if you click on each, it should show the correct size in GB. Yes, it resized my OSX partition, while booted, nondestructively, without breaking my ability to boot Windows.
From there, I inserted the Ubuntu 7.10 live CD and restarted. rEFIt came up and I chose the option to boot to the Linux CD. I reformatted the new HFS partition as ext3 using the Partitioning tool, but I think it would have worked from in the installer as well. I ran the installer as normal, choosing to partition manually. It wanted to format the ext3 partition again to use it as root, so I let it. It complained about not getting a swap partition, but that’s normal. The only thing to be careful of at this point is that in the last window of the installer, you have to click the “Advanced” button and tell it to install grub to the same partition as Linux, not hd0, or it will overwrite the Master Boot Record. In my case (EFI system on 1, OSX on 2, Linux on 3, and Vista on 4) that meant installing to /dev/sda3.
When that finished, I rebooted and hoped for the best. rEFIt came up with three entries! I have been able to boot all three OSes now just fine, with no partitioning from command line!
I hope this can help others out there looking for an easy way to cram all three OSes on a mac.
If I succeed I’ll update this post. It will be great to have KDE running natively again… how I’ve missed that!
Oh yeah, it’s so weird to see Windows XP booting on a Mac the first few times. It seems so wrong, somehow…
UPDATE: It worked! Following these instructions works to get Gentoo, Windows XP, and Mac OS X 10.5.1 running on my MacBook Pro!
After a brief hiatus to play with failover and load-balancing we’re back online! I’ll be doing some more testing to quantify the feasibility of hosting a website from two geographically disparate servers without having a single centralized database or filesystem - both common points of failure. Stay tuned for updates on this project!
Today started off with Aaron and I making a stop in radio shack for some circuit boards for the Christmas Light Display project. We also ended up getting a cable and a switch that we needed for the projector. While we were there we realized that we also needed a board for the alarm. So we picked up our boards and found an enclosure for the alarm that would work with the board we picked out.
We cleaned up for a good portion of the day. Off and on mostly. Got the cables hooked up to the projector, so we played around with that for a while and listened to some music. Eventually we finished cleaning after we had some dinner.
Aaron worked for a bit, as we listened to music some more. He also began to solder the components onto the circuit boards for the Computer Control System for the displays. While he was doing that he suggested I check out wxWidgets. I read up on it and started to try and use it and get familiar with it. It seems like it is a pretty powerful set of libraries for the C++ language as it is cross platform capable. A useful open source GUI toolkit for most major Operating Systems.